Thursday, May 29, 2014

On this day in 1942, on the advice of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler orders all Jews in occupied Paris to wear an identifying yellow star on the left side of their coats.

Joseph Goebbels had made the persecution, and ultimately the
extermination, of Jews a personal priority from the earliest days of the
war, often recording in his diary such statements as: "They are no
longer people but beasts," and "[T]he Jews... are now being evacuated
eastward. The procedure is pretty barbaric and is not to be described
here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews."

But Goebbels was not the first to suggest this particular form of
isolation. "The yellow star may make some Catholics shudder," wrote a
French newspaper at the time. "It renews the most strictly Catholic
tradition."

Intermittently, throughout the history of the papal states,
that territory in central Italy controlled by the pope, Jews were often
confined to ghettoes and forced to wear either yellow hats or yellow
stars.

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

On this day in 1940, after 18 days of ceaseless
German bombardment, the king of Belgium, having asked for an armistice,
is given only unconditional surrender as an option. He takes it.

German
forces had moved into Belgium on May 10, part of Hitler's initial
western offensive. Despite some support by British forces, the Belgians
were simply outnumbered and outgunned from the beginning. The first
surrender of Belgium territory took place only one day after the
invasion, when the defenders of Fort Eben-Emael surrendered.

Disregarding the odds, King Leopold III of Belgium had tried to rally his forces, evoking the Belgian victory during World War I. The Belgian forces fought on, courageously, but were continually overcome by the invaders.

By
May 27, the king of Belgium, realizing that his army was depleted and
that even retreat was no longer an option, sent an emissary through the
German lines to request an armistice, a cease-fire. It was rejected. The
Germans demanded unconditional surrender. Belgium's government in
exile, stationed in Paris, repudiated the surrender, but to no avail.
Belgium had no army left to fight. In the House of Commons, British
Prime Minister Winston Churchill
defended King Leopold's decision, despite the fact that it made the
British troops' position, attempting to evacuate Dunkirk, in northern
France, more precarious.

King Leopold refused to flee the country and was taken prisoner by the Nazis
during their occupation, and confined to his palace. A Belgian
underground army grew up during the occupation; its work including
protecting the port of Antwerp, the most important provisioning point
for Allied troops on the Continent, from destruction by the Germans.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

On May 27, 1941, the British navy sinks the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic near France. The German death toll was more than 2,000.

On February 14, 1939, the 823-foot Bismarck was launched at
Hamburg. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler hoped that the state-of-the-art
battleship would herald the rebirth of the German surface battle fleet.
However, after the outbreak of war, Britain closely guarded ocean routes
from Germany to the Atlantic Ocean, and only U-boats moved freely
through the war zone.

In May 1941, the order was given for the Bismarck to break out
into the Atlantic. Once in the safety of the open ocean, the battleship
would be almost impossible to track down, all the while wreaking havoc
on Allied convoys to Britain. Learning of its movement, Britain sent
almost the entire British Home Fleet in pursuit.

On May 24, the British
battle cruiser Hood and battleship Prince of Wales intercepted it near Iceland. In a ferocious battle, the Hood exploded and sank, and all but three of the 1,421 crewmen were killed. The Bismarck
escaped, but because it was leaking fuel it fled for occupied France.
On May 26, it was sighted and crippled by British aircraft, and on May
27 three British warships descended on the Bismarck and finished it off.

Monday, May 19, 2014

On this day in 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt
set a date for the cross-Channel landing that would become D-Day—May 1,
1944. That date will prove a bit premature, as bad weather becomes a
factor.

Addressing a joint session of Congress, Churchill warned that the
real danger at present was the "dragging-out of the war at enormous
expense" because of the risk that the Allies would become "tired or
bored or split"—and play into the hands of Germany and Japan. He pushed
for an early and massive attack on the "underbelly of the Axis." And so,
to "speed" things up, the British prime minister and President
Roosevelt set a date for a cross-Channel invasion of Normandy, in
northern France, for May 1, 1944, regardless of the problems presented
by the invasion of Italy, which was underway. It would be carried out by
29 divisions, including a Free French division, if possible.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

On this day in 1942, a bill establishing a women's
corps in the U.S. Army becomes law, creating the Women's Auxiliary Army
Corps (WAACs) and granting women official military status.

In May 1941, Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts,
the first congresswoman ever from New England, introduced legislation
that would enable women to serve in the Army in noncombat positions.

Rogers was well suited for such a task; during her husband John J.
Rogers' term as congressman, Rogers was active as a volunteer for the
Red Cross, the Women's Overseas League, and military hospitals.

Because
of her work inspecting field and base hospitals, President Warren G. Harding,
in 1922, appointed her as his personal representative for inspections
and visits to veterans' hospitals throughout the country. She was
eventually appointed to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, as
chairwoman in the 80th and 83rd Congresses.

The bill to create a Women's Auxiliary Army Corps would not be passed
into law for a year after it was introduced (the bombing of Pearl Harbor
was a great incentive). But finally, the WAACs gained official status
and salary—but still not all the benefits accorded to men. Thousands of
women enlisted in light of this new legislation, and in July 1942, the
"auxiliary" was dropped from the name, and the Women's Army Corps, or
WACs, received full Army benefits in keeping with their male
counterparts.

The WACs performed a wide variety of jobs, "releasing a man for
combat," as the Army, sensitive to public misgivings about women in the
military, touted. But those jobs ranged from clerk to radio operator,
electrician to air-traffic controller. Women served in virtually every
theater of engagement, from North Africa to Asia.

It would take until 1978 before the Army would become sexually
integrated, and women participating as merely an "auxiliary arm" in the
military would be history. And it would not be until 1980 that 16,000
women who had joined the earlier WAACs would receive veterans' benefits.